


Remembering To Forget What It Tastes Like

by Blue Yeti (blueyeti)



Category: Life
Genre: Gen, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:52:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueyeti/pseuds/Blue%20Yeti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Crews, stop talking to yourself," he says, for a few months of now, a few months of a now when he doesn't remember to do push ups and his body belongs to someone new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembering To Forget What It Tastes Like

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Annakovsky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annakovsky/gifts).



Charlie Crews stares at four walls. Four walls. Six hundred and seventy two sound insulation tiles, and one eighth. Three lines traceable through the grey concrete of the ceiling. Like an overcast sky in the afternoon when not even dribbling rain has fallen, but it's not dark enough to shade the grey to blues or bruises yet. If that is a colour the sky can be, the grey of cinderblocks. Charlie can't remember. He doesn't know how long he's stared at the concrete, because that would be time, and there isn't any time in here, only now. Again and again it is now.

There is always a stain upon the floor, a dark creeping maroon, leeching from the concrete. He knows it isn't blood. For the first six months, if it wasn't three or eight, Crews was still Charlie, just Charlie who happened to be inside. The second first six months, the first six in SHU. When Charlie still did sets of push-ups every day, counting them under his breath, and every inhale his nose breathed in the stain, on every down, and down, and down. Perhaps the previous occupant had still been Aaron or Mike or Zach, and lost his balance on a down. Crushing a fragile nose, already broken three times before invoking the protective custody of a cell in an isolation block. A disembodied boot of authority slamming against his neck, pushing him down down. Truncheon to his back, ribs only bruised, and the musicality of inmates, metal bands yelling and bass drum voices keeping time to the melody of hits. That didn't happen. Not yet. Did it happen that first month or two, to the convict in 41B? He can't remember.

He can remember innocence, when innocence was his best friend's kids, calling him Uncle Charlie. Before they—before he— Before. In prison it is a meaningless word. It means blaming the girl you raped, the cops who caught you. Like a song on the radio played too often, just noise and beat and meaning lost if it ever had any. Everyone in prison is innocent. That is what they play on the radio, isn't it?

Crews was innocent. Is innocent. Was innocent until Baker was on the floor and his shank in Crews's hand; he can't feel the toothbrush handle, just blood sticky all over, like shattering a honey jar. "But I didn't kill Tom." He didn't hear Paula's feet as she ran up the stairs, panting. Would she have been panting? Fear makes people pant, even if they run every morning even in winter. He didn't hear Daniel screaming from his room, and didn't kick his toys over to get at him. He didn't walk right up to Tom, no need to hide, just pat him on the back and drive the knife right in, like stabbing a fork through honeydew melon. "I would remember."

He knows it's not blood on his floor. He's seen enough to recognise the scent. It doesn't look like the pictures of the pool beneath Paula. A deep lagoon the shape of her breast, with an inlet where her shoulder lay. They bagged her up, a little black bag zipped closed. "A little black bag of a closed case," Crews laughs every day, as the cell door clangs closed. "It's not blood. On the floor, that's not blood. It doesn't taste like blood." Just a tang of cold, a little sweat dripping from his forehead in those months he still did push-ups, and a fuzzy sensation of dust floating on the back of his tongue.

 "Stop talking to yourself, Crews," he says a few times, testing out the words, marking out the time from waking to food. "Crews, stop talking to yourself," he says, for a few months of now, a few months of a now when he doesn't remember to do push ups and his body belongs to someone new. A Crews who has always had those two hundred and forty-one stitches, and a husky voice scratching his throat. A Crews who lies on the floor to wait for food, his face in the not-bloodstain. He can see through the chuck hole when the tray comes in. A little slice of feet and shattered corridor, and a hand holding the tray. It is usually a white hand, about fifty, with sunspots on the back and dark brown hair crawling forward to the knuckles. An old guard, still here, still here waiting on a pension and his uselessness crawling forward until all he can do is take the trays around the isolation blocks.

"What's the day like?" he says to the hairy knuckles.

"Oh, pretty bright. Pretty bright day, my wife's doing her flowers."

The knuckles walk off. The wave of sound travels, two feet walking away, and then he can't hear them anymore, just in his head, feet that keep stomping, jumping, dancing. Ankles that crack, like Jen's did late at night if she had to go to the loo. Heels on a parquet floor. The echo when they're gone. His lawyer's big feet crunching, crunching, not stomping the law into submission, "but he thought I did it too." The grating crack of his arm jerked behind him. A mouth right by his ear, talking, talking, Mirandizing law and no witty one liners as if this is a police procedural. _"You have the right to remain silent."_ Not that he could have got away with an appeal based on a botched arrest, he's a cop. He was a cop. They got it right, of course they did, and it's not like he wasn't mouthing the words along in his head, arresting himself. _"Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?"_ He always did that. The speech is so ingrained from training and life and work, he was always saying it inside his head when Bobby was making the arrest. Is that normal? To arrest yourself? He was a cop, that should means he still is one. The law is still in his head, it's still there, doesn't that count for anything? He's more a cop now, it's been stabbed into him from every angle, with shanks and bites and kicks and Baker's toothbrush. It was a job, a good job, now it's—now it's that, it's all that—now it's all there is. The bar, the friends, the family, dust like the taste on the floor.

He doesn't remember the taste of dust before prison. Or the tang of pineapples. Or Jen's perfume when he kissed her neck. He should have tasted those breaths of dust, suspended in sunlight when he looked across the living room, at least thirteen feet by eighteen and he never knew that was luxury. And there's a world outside. Not much of a view: a lawn, a street with the neighbour's Ford in front of an orange tree, a basketball hoop in the drive. So much green that he could reach out, touch it, taste it. Why had he never tasted grass? All those years wasted in a normal life, and he never tasted green grass. It probably tastes like kale, or rocket, or spinach. It probably tastes like a rare beef steak and mash potatoes. Tastes like beef, and no one knows, because who eats grass?

"Tom's family, I couldn't, how could I have? Rachel and Danny calling me Uncle Charlie. And whenever we saw them all together Jen would say, she'd say maybe we should be trying. Because that's what it is, that's what it all is, friends and family," kids and Star Wars and Rachel's new skirt. Tom and beer and pizza and football, and if his voice was hoarse it was from roaring victory. "And Dad telling me to visit more often, and now he won't let Mom see me because they both know I did it. Dad said something to the news about trying to raise a son right. She called me Uncle Charlie." Rachel fell as she was playing, once. Fell and cried and sat in the little dribbles of blood coagulating on the hot pavement. A little fall, a slipping foot, a sneaker on its toe and then nowhere at all, and a knee—hip—face slamming down like the guard's truncheon, splintering his shoulder blade and he can still hear the pop of his arm flying free. He feels the echo of the cracks and the pop when he stretches that arm up, but there is nothing to reach.

"I can remember Jen," he tells the cell every day, though Crews can't stand the memory. Her hands on his neck, her voice in his ear, her hair like little trickles of water down his face, a caress of everything as she lent over the couch to nibble his lip. Hair over her shoulder, oranges in her shampoo. It didn't smell like fruit; it smelt like Jen and skin and warmth. "Sunlight, though. Why can't I remember sunlight? It's not just warm, like person warm. Does sunlight feel like Jen, or did Jen feel like the sun, or did sunlight feel like sunlight and Jen like home? Or home like Jen?"

He can't remember Paula and Danny and Tom. He can't see the blood curling below Paula's body, blue-red and warm, slipping from her. They paraded them out at the trial, glossy A3 images of life captured, splattered below them. They were the murdered Seybolts, Thomas and Paula and Daniel. Or this man standing before you, members of the jury, "this man's friends. A little boy who called him Uncle Charlie, a little boy who loved him, who loved Luke Skywalker. A child." He wanted to say that Danny loved Han Solo, he'd thought that Luke was very uncool, and heaven help you if you'd called him a little boy. But no one listened to him anyway.

All that evidence, all of it, and he doesn't remember what he did that night. Wasn't it boring, nothing? Just cleaning the cuts on his hands, waiting for Jen to come home. He doesn't remember what he talked about to Jen; if it was the arrest, or the story Bobby told in the squat car coming back to the station, or Tom's new idea for the bar. He doesn't remember it, so it didn't happen. He didn't talk to Jen about anything, she wasn't home. Out with the girls, that's what she said. Forrest Gump. He never saw that movie. She wasn't home, they said that at the trial. So he doesn't remember, because it never happened, and if he did remember he could be not not remembering just because it's easier that way.

"I don't remember. That means—doesn't that mean I didn't—I would remember." Blood from Tom's throat spurting across his forearms, dripping down to the vibrations of Paula's screams, moist little trails of life. That's not like the sting of pineapple acid on his tongue, or the feeling of his skin tightening up beneath the sun, "that feeling, what was that? Tightness over my shoulders, like the skin is pulling in, shrinking down, when I knew, I know—when I knew I was just about to burn. And the man who killed them, that man who had his blood, her blood, their blood all over his hands. The man who killed them, smiling at the newscasts, laughing, or grinning, or smirking, as Charlie Crews got life."

Insulation tiles crowding close, one on top on top on top. He doesn't think the cell is getting narrower, as they crowd together like gossips, like jurors, and Jen's face, "Charlie, tell me you didn't. Tell me—I just—I need you to tell me." And he told her the same, the story told to her the first day inside, when he was smarting and bright eyed and didn't think he would ever actually cry. Told in interrogation rooms with slanting light across the table, and a detective breathing over him. Why did they bother to breathe over him? Last breaths of what he didn't know was freedom, and it was regurgitated air smelling like Ames, and wrists clinking in handcuffs. Told to his parents; Mom was crying, he doesn't want her crying. Told to the lawyers with grey polyester suits and all he can see are his crossed orange arms as he has already learnt to look down. Told to the jury, and he can see their faces as each of them decides, somewhere before the Prosecution finished their case, that he is as guilty as OJ Simpson wasn't.

He was still in the main population when OJ Simpson got off. The hollering and joking and punching took a new angle, laughing and joking and raging. Every inmate was OJ, so innocent, sympathetic, so misunderstood. "Everyone talking about their trial. All those stories to tell, evidence to discount, grudges leading to appeal. Everyone is innocent." Set up by cops, planted evidence growing into glove trees and hatstands and freedom. Catch the cop in the bathroom, no shanks necessary, just feet and fists and elbows, chanting their personal vendettas into his skin. Five weeks in the hospital, another thirty-seven stitches, all stitched up, and their voices yelling every time he moves the wrong way.

And then Jen's on the other side of glass, her hair now dyed brown and short in a pixie cut. Cut away, cut away, cut off. She doesn't look at the bruises creeping from his collar, doesn't let her eyes drop that low. Her voice through the phone sounds like she's three cities away. Watching her lips is like a foreign film badly dubbed, another world with Italians falling in love in Sorento, eating prosciutto and wearing colourful shirts. Dark hair curling around her ears, caressing the phone, untouchable. Then there were divorce papers that came with a state lawyer to explain that the convict did not need to consent, there could be a court order, but this was just quicker for her to move on. Move away. New life with her maiden name, never married to the murderer who kissed her stomach and licked the patterns between her moles, speaking in tongues.

Nothing outside anymore. No outside, just this little exercise yard, that's not a yard at all, only a concrete square with a basketball hoop, and the three point line vanishes into the wall. No sky, not even here, and an hour later back in the cell, counting six hundred, seventy two, one eighth. Jen with her pixie hair, curling around her ears. The girl who called him Uncle Charlie, is she a teenager yet? Does she see Aunt Jen, and whatever man she married? Is he allowed to think of her? When he—when he—when she was at a sleepover. And that's all it was, a sleepover. A life for a girls night giggling in pink pyjamas. Of course he doesn't remember.

Jen's hair falling over her shoulders, running across the inmate's face like the itchy crawl of three dozen ants. Too close, her face so close and covered in ants, and she's not reaching for him, hasn't for years. Just the Charlie she used to love, except she didn't really know him when he was still outside, and can't look at him now. She didn't know him, couldn't—she knows he killed their friends. Didn't love him, couldn't, didn't, because inmate #94A658 is not a husband. #94A658 killed a family, stabbing and running and screaming. Smashed Tom's head against the wall to hold him still while he cut his throat, and that was rage. Anger like the convicts with their feet to his spine. The wives he brought in with their husband's blood still wet on their fingers. The girls he stood guard over, waiting for the coroner with the little black bags. Everyone can do it. Paula's blood slipping forth elegantly, softly, like a dance, a little leak, a little slit in a chest cavity of red food dye. A sprawling puddle beneath her, new patterns creeping forth in slowly gained inches. Daniel's face, not really scared, all Han Solo and lightsabers and Uncle Charlie being a cop. And the toys sprawling beneath his feet, and Daniel turning away, not frozen, and little Danny so small and broken, a little LEGO boy.

There's not a lot of blood, in that stain on the floor, but he stares at it all the same. He doesn't wonder if it's blood or not, not anymore, it's just the setting for the memories which aren't not true. Watching Rachel brushing Jen's hair, long and careful strokes, each one an act of care and love. Can it be love if it's so unconscious, or is that the only time it is love? Golden and brown and the sparkled back of the brush glinting in the sunlight. This didn't happen either. Crews didn't know to watch the sunlight, the glints in Jen's hair. No one said to ingrain the speech habits of children, loud and bright and self-righteous, because there is a world where they don't exist. Didn't know to feel the texture of a crisp green apple. No one told him this was his last now, before this now.

Another few months of now, where now is just memories which hurt so much they must be good, each one a shank in his abdomen attempting to twist his insides and slice them into fraying ribbons. Another few months, and Crews picks up the book in the yard. Just a little book, green cover, stupid title. _The Path to Zen._ Of course it's a stupid title. A prison title. All the inmates pick up books on finding peace, it looks good to the guards. Like there is peace to be found here in the dark and the fighting and the cells with no windows. Peace in the nutra-loaf; that would be peace in nothing. A tasteless nothing which sustains you indefinitely. Now, and now, and now. Sitting and standing and lying. Counting and breathing and reading. Now is Zen. He already knew that there is only now. There is no future for a SHU inmate; no past but what lies in his head. Now is this now, it's always been this now, but that's just because the past is so much further away than it ever was before. It says to let go of the future, there is no future. Of course there is no future, this is only now. Prison, again and again. Six hundred and seventy-two and an eighth again, each individual twist of insulation grain memorised for months. Years. It has to be years, doesn't it?

This is why the book was in the yard. Refuse. Rubbish. Telling a convict he's got to be where he is. No one should have to be where he is. When this is where he is. Just tiles and walls and memories, and why can't he remember? Why isn't memory Zen? When memory is rich and deep and filled with love and bright colours. Which is pain, but that is like repentance, like scraping himself over and over to feel how it hurts. To remember that it hurts. It should hurt. Prison is dark and alone and angry. Everyone so angry. Nothing to be angry about; there is only now, and maybe that is angry, but he's been here so long it's not any more. Is that Zen?

The book does not help him remember. It does not tell him to forget. It tells him it does no good to pretend to forget, to pretend to change, because there is only now, and now is change. He is polishing the mirror of his mind; there is no mirror. That is zazen, right? There is no mirror in this room because he is an inmate, and not to be trusted with mirrors. Of course they can't have a mirror, but because it is a weapon or because it is an identity. Is identity a weapon? It isn't a weapon, it's a shield. A shield of knowing how his mouth squints a little when he thinks, or remembering the clinging burn of his thighs when he added another mile to his morning run. That's him, in the mirror and the wedding photos and the newspaper articles. Is his hair still red? He's not old; it should be red. His hair elsewhere is still red, this hasn't changed.

The Buddha did not mean an actual mirror. Did the Buddha have mirrors? He doesn't have any ability to check, he would like the library. Is the story from the Buddha, or someone else? But there is no mirror, only now; only Charlie Crews polishing at a tattered place where there is no mirror. A mirror which is a shield. Like his badge is a shield—was a shield—and now is rusting in an evidence locker. Jen wouldn't have asked for it, would she? Would they give it to her? Just a piece of metal, like the mirror which he can't look at because it's not in front of him, and the book says you can only look at what is in front of him. But wouldn't that make him as master? He's seen what's in front of him for years, and he's forgotten how long that is. Doesn't that make him a master? Only here, only now. Charlie Crews, #94A658, who does not have a shield.

Is this anger? Just their faces lined up, Tom and Paula and Daniel and Rachel, Jen and Mom and did Dad change his name when Charlie Crews was that famous crooked murdering cop? Not very angry anymore. Not even for those poor inmates and the stitches along his side, even though he can still feel them when he reaches. Is that memories, though? Memories are false. There is no I who watches himself, there is only himself, and the I in the memories is not real. He knew they weren't real. He didn't need the book to tell him that.

The only truth is now. Again, it is now. Who he was, that is myth. A mythical Charlie Crews who was a cop. Is not a cop. That was the truth, if it was ever truth. It wasn't truth, it was a lie. A murder who is a cop who is a husband who is a lie. There is now, and he is in now. He is in prison. He is an inmate. That is the truth. That has to be the only truth. Now isn't tiles and shouting and reading the book. It is being an inmate. Being a murderer. Being here. SHU is a sheild, protecting the old him. The one with the badge and the mirror and the wife. Protecting an I which does not exist. He is an inmate, a convict. Not a cop. He doesn't need to be a cop anymore. He can just be here, now. Here. And there can be light again.

Another now, and the hairy knuckles are coming past. They look a little tanned.

"The wife's flowers are looking lovely. She's got some peach blossom that's just about turning, though the birds eat most of them." The knuckles say.

"I can see them," Crews doesn't say, though he can see them in his mind, but had he ever really looked at a fruit tree before he was here?

"Sir," he actually says, after saying it so many times in his head as to be almost perfect. "Would I be able to speak to the warden? I would like to talk about being moved back into main population. Can it be arranged? Just the talking, I'm not asking you for anything other than a chance to talk to him, I wouldn't. I just want to talk to him, that's what I need."

The knuckles know him. They know he misses the sun and asks about the daylight. Knows he's not in SHU for gang ties. He's the cop, the inmate lowest of the low, here for his protection. If he doesn't want that protection, that's one less prisoner for the state to feed if he chooses to advance the date of his release from this prison of a world which everyone lives upon.

That's what it is, isn't it? He didn't think he was crazy, but this is crazy, isn't it? Just because he is an inmate doesn't mean everyone else thinks he is. Just because he isn't a cop doesn't mean he wasn't a cop. But the only now is now, and this now, in this now he is here. Inmate. Murderer. Convict. His own truth.

"I'll see what I can do. Crews, right?"

"Yes, Charlie Crews. Number 94A658. Thank you."

"I didn't promise anything."

"You don't need to promise anything for me to thank you."


End file.
